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Small business owners face all sorts of challenges, from mental health to finding the right employees to paying rent.
Lauren Oto — through her work as the executive director of the Sacramento Asian Pacific Chamber of Commerce Foundation — aims to tackle these challenges by creating an “ecosystem” of sorts.
The chamber advocates for businesses to reduce barriers and provides technical assistance workshops, Oto said, while the foundation helps build the workforce pipeline to diversify what leadership looks like within organizations.
This type of work, she said, became increasingly important in 2020 — at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic — when violent anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 125%, according to the California Department of Justice.
“Over the last six years, we’ve really dove deep into the work to understand that now a lot of our small business employees and employers have become victims of some sort of hate crime,” Oto said.
Oto and her colleagues also work to provide mental health services for small businesses. She said 100% of the businesses she works with don’t have a fully-funded budget for mental health resources, but each of these businesses are open to providing something at low to no cost, sparking the organization to take action.
“We have a platform, a digital platform that we’ve launched providing free access to our small businesses to be able to go on and take assessments as it relates to their stress level, depression levels, anxiety levels,” Oto said. “From there it automatically will populate some resources based on their assessment of how they maybe can minimize the stress on their job.”
Lauren Oto is a 2026 Change Maker on Wednesday, July 29, 2026. HECTOR AMEZCUA hamezcua@sacbee.com
Oto is Japanese American herself and grew up in the Sacramento region. She said she enjoys working in the nonprofit space, so when the opportunity to work at the chamber came, she jumped at the opportunity.
“Our work has grown. My role has grown. The level of impact that I’ve been able to make in the community has grown,” Oto said. “I really think where I’m at now is really a great opportunity for us to continue growing and continue growing in the ways that we show impact in the community.”
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Corey Schmidt is a watchdog reporter for The Sacramento Bee, focusing on Folsom, El Dorado Hills and Sacramento County’s eastern suburbs. Previously, he was the government watchdog reporter for the St. Cloud Times in Minnesota. Schmidt received his bachelor’s degree from DePaul University in Chicago and his master’s degree from Yale University.